This?

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

I Feel a Song Coming On

Friend Putnam sent me a DVD of a show he played a few months back. Not necessarily to entertain me - in fact, I was at the show in question - but for me to take a couple of tracks and put them up on his website. Not such a random thing, when you realize I'm his webmaster.

Anyway, I was lying in bed, folding laundry, and I popped it in the DVD player. Really, an excellent performance. But I got hit with such a strange, obscure sense of melancholy halfway through - one of those feelings that's so hard to pin down that I can really only successfully even outline the vague and hazy shape of it by putting it into a song lyric and using that to nail it down for myself afterwards.

I tend to treat songs like therapy - if something is bothering me, and I can't sort it out, I can study something I've written for a clue about what's eating me. Of course, that trick of equilibrium was much easier when I wrote on a regular basis. Now I only write pretty much when I 'have to' write; that is, when a project I'm involved in (PCMA being the current one) has need for a song. It's been a long time since I really treated songwriting as a thing I do. Which is a little odd, because it is something that I think I'm good at. But there you go.

Anyhow, I do have a new chord sequence that's looking for a melody, lyric and arrangement, and my writing method usually leaves new songs sitting undeveloped until I have something to write about - which I guess I now do.